The Last Volcano Read online

  Thurston and Jaggar exchanged letters, discussing what should be done next at Kilauea. They agreed that someone should come and continue Perret’s work as soon as possible. The obvious choice was Jaggar himself. In one of his letters, he explained why he could not come immediately.

  “I am expecting an addition to my family about the end of October. This would make my going to Hawaii in November impossible, even if my work here would permit it, which it would not. I would have been with you in June were it not for this prospect which made my going to active volcanoes for the time out of the question.”

  Two weeks later, again writing to Thurston, Jaggar said he knew someone who might be willing to work at Kilauea permanently. “I have in mind a man, Mr. Ferguson, graduate of Harvard. . . . He is of an experimental turn of mind and might be a good man for superintendent of the observatory. . . . It is possible that I might get him to go . . . as I think he is in this country. I am sending out a letter today with a view to locating him.”

  Henry Ferguson had been one of Jaggar’s students at Harvard. He had led the expedition to Iceland in 1905 when Jaggar had been unable to go and had almost joined Jaggar on the Alaska adventure. After graduation, Ferguson had taken a job as a government geologist in the Philippines. It did not go well. He had hoped to study the volcanoes and record the effects of earthquakes. Instead, as he wrote to Jaggar, “I have been troubled somewhat with dysentery and while well enough, I find it hard to keep up my enthusiasm.” Ferguson was now back in the United States and working as a geologist in California, assaying gold mines. After his health problems in the Philippines, he wanted nothing more to do with a tropical climate, and that included Hawaii.

  Jaggar asked others—George Hosmer, Reginald Daly, Norman Bowen—all associated with MIT and all men who would become experts in their fields, Hosmer as a topographer, Daly and Bowen as petrologists. None of them wanted to dedicate themselves to Kilauea. If one had, the subsequent story would have been different.

  And so Jaggar wrote to Thurston. “Frankly, I know of no one interested who would do the work but Perret and myself. With Perret in Italy the question appears to narrow itself to me.” Then he added, “Just as [Perret’s] heart is in Naples, so mine is in Hawaii much more than it is in Boston.”

  Encouraged by Jaggar’s latest letter, Thurston asked by telegram: “When will you arrive Honolulu?”

  There was the practical concern of money, Jaggar answered. The MIT Executive Committee had refused to approve the spending of any more money at Kilauea, including that from the Whitney fund. And so Thurston took another step. His businesses were showing profits, as were those of many other prominent businessmen in the islands. On October 5, 1911, at a luncheon at the University Club of Honolulu, under Thurston’s direction, a resolution was passed that established the Hawaiian Volcano Research Association. The primary purpose of the Association was to raise money from local contributors to support scientific work at Hawaiian volcanoes. In hindsight, this was the pivotal act that led to the establishment of a permanent volcano observatory, only the second of its kind in the entire world. But there was another hurdle to clear—Jaggar and his family.

  His mother-in-law, Ella Kline, had arrived in Boston in October 1911 to assist her daughter in the birth of her next child. The Jaggars had already moved from the isolated stone mansion at the top of a hill in Brookline to a comfortable, though small, house on Concord Avenue in Cambridge, a few blocks from the Harvard campus.

  Ella Russell Kline was a tiny woman. She was raised a Quaker and, after her marriage to George Kline, she joined the Episcopal Church, remaining a devoted member throughout her life. She was also the quintessential Victorian woman. Whenever she entered a room, even in her own house, she always walked erect and with poise and was properly attired wearing a dark skirt and light blouse that covered her neck, chest and arms and left only her hands exposed. When she finally approved of the installation of a telephone in the Kline house, she insisted that it be out of sight under the stairs and that a large mirror be hung nearby so that she could check appearance before talking on the telephone. She was also known to use a bath sheet that was pulled over a tub, leaving only one end open. After a maid had filled the tub with water, the maid would leave the room and Mrs. Kline would enter. She would disrobe alone, then slide into the tub and beneath the sheet and wash herself, only her head exposed.

  On November 2, a daughter, Eliza Bowne, was born. Two weeks earlier, just about the time when his mother-in-law arrived, Jaggar asked MIT President Maclaurin and the Executive Committee to grant him a leave-of-absence to work at Kilauea. The request was granted.

  The Jaggar family, including Ella Kline, spent Christmas Day at the rented house in Cambridge. The next day Jaggar said goodbye to his wife, his six-year-old son and newborn daughter. One can only imagined what glances, perhaps, what words, were exchanged between him and his mother-in-law as he left for the Hawaiian Islands.

  *This building is still at Kilauea and houses a gallery for the Volcano Art Center.

  †About $2,500,000 in today’s dollars.

  ‡George Lycurgus, the counterrevolutionary and owner of the Volcano House, was Demosthenes’ uncle and was in Greece when Perret and Shepherd arrived at Kilauea.

  CHAPTER NINE

  A DREAM FULFILLED

  I do not know just how long I will remain here,” Jaggar announced to a waiting newspaper reporter as soon as he arrived in Honolulu. “I will probably stay here several months, but when I leave, I will leave the work in charge of an assistant, whom I expect to find about next week.”

  Finally, after a delay of more than two years, he was back in the Hawaiian Islands, landing in Honolulu on January 9. He spent a week in the city. His first task was to make contact with Thurston who took him to a private meeting with the territorial governor, Walter Frear, who asked Jaggar what he thought of Kilauea becoming a national park.

  Jaggar favored the idea. And to make it into a reality, as well as to facilitate the planned scientific work, he suggested that a detailed topographic map be made of the summit region. And so Frear ordered it done. The governor sent word to the Territory’s Chief Surveyor, Claude Birdseye, who was surveying a densely forested area on the steep north coast of the island of Hawaii. The governor gave Birdseye one day to move his men, their surveying instruments and their camping equipment to Kilauea and start preparing the needed map. In his rush to follow the governor’s orders, Birdseye was careless and one of his mules kicked him in the face, causing him to lose a few teeth. To make matters more challenging, he planned to get married in Hilo the next Saturday. The wedding happened as planned, but a honeymoon was postponed so that the work at Kilauea could proceed.

  Thurston was at Kilauea when Birdseye arrived and pointed out where the park boundaries would be. In all, the new national park would cover nearly sixty acres and include the crater Halema’uma’u. Notwithstanding his injuries, Birdseye, who happened to be a distant cousin of Clarence Birdseye of frozen-food fame, completed the survey in the remarkably short time of three months. Three additional months were required to prepare the actual map, which Frear carried to Washington, D.C., and showed to Congressional members the following fall. Another four years of lobbying were required before Congress approved the establishment of Hawaii National Park.

  Jaggar arrived at Kilauea on January 17, 1912, reaching the Volcano House at noon. After lunch, he reviewed the recent activity recorded in the Volcano House Register and in several newspaper articles pasted into a scrapbook. According to one of the articles, the New Year’s Eve party at the Volcano House had been interrupted when revelers standing on the hotel’s verandah heard the roar of distant lava fountains and saw red glowing rocks flying above the rim of Halema’uma’u. Many of them raced to their cars, then sped down the road to the crater, some of the revelers hanging onto the outside of vehicles. The party resumed at the edge of the crater just before midnight. A few people found a way down to the edge of the lava, which, on this night
, was only thirty feet below the rim; the highest level the lake had been in almost twenty years. During the next two weeks, the lake had quieted and the level had dropped. When Jaggar arrived, it was almost two hundred feet down.

  At mid-afternoon, hotel manager Demosthenes Lycurgus provided Jaggar with a car and a driver to take him to the crater. He arrived at 4:30 P.M. Jaggar took notes: The lake was nearly circular. Two large craggy islands of solidified lava stood near the center of the lake, rafted around by the slowly churning lava. He sketched the islands and an outline of the lake. He paced out a baseline, then, with a handheld compass, he measured angles, later computing that the lake was 718 feet across at its widest point and 218 feet below the rim. Finally, he took out a pocket watch and timed successive bursts of Old Faithful. The average interval between bursts was thirty-six seconds. These notes were the beginning of continuous scientific observations of Kilauea that have continued ever since.

  Such meticulous recording—Jaggar wrote in a perfect grade-school script—would be the hallmark of his work at Kilauea and at Mauna Loa when that volcano was erupting. With few exceptions, for the next twelve years, whenever he was at Kilauea and the lava lake was present, he made a point of standing on the rim of Halema’uma’u and recording the activity at least once a day, ideally twice a day if other work did not intervene.

  And there was much else to be done. The owner of the Volcano House, George Lycurgus, made a special trip from Honolulu to meet Jaggar. In a letter Lycurgus had sent to Jaggar the previous month, he had promised the use of one of the hotel cottages to house scientific equipment. But so many guests had been staying at the hotel that Lycurgus suggested a new building be constructed. And so he took Jaggar to Hilo and introduced him to local business owners and convinced them to contribute money to the construction of the new building.

  Thurston had also followed Jaggar to Kilauea. He selected the site for the new building, across the road from the Volcano House and close to the edge of a high cliff that formed part of the caldera rim. Whether Thurston knew this was a place important to local Hawaiians is unknown, but, to them, this short stretch of land with few trees and heavy brush and the occasional steaming crack was known as Mauli-ola, named for a local goddess whose healing powers were said to reside in the steam.

  The ground, of course, had to be prepared before construction could begin. On February 6, in view of a small audience of hotel guests who followed Jaggar after breakfast to the site, the MIT professor took a machete and slashed through the brush, outlining the grounds of the observatory. Then three men, inmates on loan from the county prison—they had committed petty offenses ranging from gambling to drunkenness—finished the job of clearing the land. The use of prison labor was common in those years. Prisoners had built much of the road that Thurston had planned and that linked Hilo and the Volcano House. They had also been used to construct the new road that ran between the Volcano House and Halema’uma’u.

  Nine days later Jaggar returned to the site. He took up four wooden stakes and marked out a square, eighteen feet on a side, using a compass to make sure the sides were aligned to the cardinal directions. Here a cellar would be dug to house scientific equipment. The alignment of the sides was necessary so that the equipment could be aligned in the same directions.

  Again prisoners were used. They took a week to dig down through six feet of volcanic ash to hard rock on which the cellar would set. Atop the cellar would be a wooden building that housed the volcano observatory.

  After three weeks, the building was practically done, so far as the carpenters and plumbers were concerned. It was built of Oregon pine. A wide porch wrapped around two sides of the building. The main entry was from the porch on the crater side. It opened into a well-lighted workroom where Jaggar planned to display the latest maps and charts that showed the progress of volcanic activity. Along two walls were a half-dozen small rooms. Most would be used for storage. One would be a small private office. Another, about the size of a closet, contained a kerosene stove to heat the building. A slightly larger room had been fitted for running water and would serve as a photographic darkroom.

  As promised on the day he returned to the islands, Jaggar hired an assistant who would be in charge after he left and returned to Boston. The assistant was Francis Dodge, an athletic 22-year-old whose most recent accomplishment was the racing of automobiles along the few paved roads on the island, the Hilo newspapers often recounting his feats. Dodge’s father, another Francis Dodge, was an engineer for Honolulu’s Rapid Transit Company and had met Jaggar in Honolulu. The older Dodge hoped his son’s passion for racing automobiles and other wild things would be tempered by the requirements of a regular job—and by the remoteness of Kilauea.

  During this period of endless preparation, Jaggar took two days to make a partial ascent of Mauna, following an ancient Hawaiian trail to a point halfway up the volcano. He spent another day in Hilo ordering wooden furniture to be made for the observatory, including two large tables, a desk, chairs, a drafting table and a case of large drawers to hold maps. On February 17 he helped rescue a sailor from the USS Colorado who was visiting the volcano and who, in trying to take a photograph, had fallen into Halema’uma’u, landing on a ledge about halfway to the bottom. Remnants of the cable that Perret and Shepherd had used to measure lava temperature were used to rescue the sailor, who later died from a fractured skull. On another day, Jaggar stood close to the edge of Halema’uma’u and lowered a microphone—one of the new microphones designed for use with office equipment produced by the Dictaphone Company of New York—into several steaming cracks. He listened intently at each crack for sounds coming from the volcano. All he heard was wind passing through the fractured rocks. He spent an entire day walking around Halema’uma’u with another new piece of equipment, a Mansfield Water Finder, whose manufacturer guaranteed could detect “subterranean springs.” The finder came in a handsome mahogany box with polished brass fittings. Inside was a large needle that could swing in one of two directions. Jaggar watched the needle as he circled the crater. Not once did the needle move.

  And there was more to do. Camping equipment had to be purchased. Jaggar needed to meet local ranchers and judge who might rent horses and mules that were healthy enough to carry equipment to the summit of Mauna Loa. The ranchers invariably asked Jaggar what was the chance a future eruption of that volcano would send a lava flow over their land. Perret’s hut had to be refurbished and repaired and moved; it had recently been vandalized. It was in the midst of such activity that a telegram arrived unexpectedly from Boston. It simply read: “The children are sick—Helen.”

  Jaggar left two days later, after he had conferred with Demosthenes Lycurgus who promised to watch over young Dodge and make sure he did not do anything reckless. Jaggar also wrote to Thurston, reminding him that his original plan had been to stay only a few months at Kilauea and to tell him why he had to return to Boston immediately.

  He also reminded Thurston that Ernest Shepherd, who had supervised the lava-temperature measurements the previous summer, and Arthur Day, who had designed the lava-temperature instruments, would be arriving soon. They were coming to Kilauea to accomplish another scientific first: the collection of volcanic gases directly from the open vent of an erupting volcano.*

  The role of gases in volcanic eruptions was self-evident to anyone who has seen an eruption. Lava froths furiously and fountains during eruptions, causing huge plumes of gas to rise up and fill the sky over volcanoes. Lacroix had concluded that these gases had been dissolved within molten rock, then released. But what types of gases were involved?

  Those with a sulfur component were an obvious choice. Sulfur is the stench common in volcanic regions, an odor that resembles that of rotting eggs. In the same region, if one looks into hollows or caves, one is apt to find scatterings of dead insects or the occasional dead mouse or small bird or, in extreme cases when conditions are right, the carcasses of large animals, as Jaggar had seen at Death Gulch at Yellowstone. Su
ch deaths were caused by the presence of carbon dioxide that, because it is heavier than air, accumulates in hollows and caves. Many nights I have sat close to where molten lava is gushing out of the ground and have been intrigued by, among other things, the flickering of thousands of tiny pale blue flames. The pale blue flames indicate the burning of hydrogen gas. But which of these is the major component of the gases emitted in volcanic eruption?

  In the 18th century, when the first systematic observations of volcanoes were being made, people rushed to the conclusion that different volcanoes emitted different types of gases. Etna was an emitter of sulfur dioxide. The perennial plume that hung over Vesuvius for most of the 18th and 19th centuries was thought to contain primarily hydrogen sulfide. The deaths of grazing animals in places such as the Dieng Plateau in Indonesia, an area surrounded by volcanoes, was thought to be caused by the sudden release of carbon dioxide.

  In the 1860s, during a tour of Italian volcanoes, French chemist Ferdinand Fouqué tried to settle the question. Included in his equipment was a large watertight leather bag that he would hold up and collect as much gas from the edge of a volcanic crater as possible. He then examined the contents of the bag. Invariably, small beads of water had formed. And dissolved within the water were a variety of acids: hydrochloric acid, sulphuric acid and carbonic acid. From this simple experiment Fouqué concluded that different volcanoes probably did emit different gases, primarily those that contained hydrogen, sulfur and carbon in varying combinations, but all of the volcanoes did have one gas in common: They all emitted water vapor.

  That is where the measurement of volcanic gases stood for nearly forty years. Then, in 1902, Swiss chemist Albert Brun was inspired by the eruption of Mount Pelée to study volcanoes. He had an advantage over others, like Jaggar and Perret, who had also been inspired by that eruption: Brun had a personal fortune to finance his work and his travels.